Competitive Research Programme (CRP)

PI: Prof. Hilmi Volkan Demir, NTU

Improving visual acuity and color discrimination with a new wave of light-emitting diodes (LEDs)

From traffic lights to the lights found in your living room, solid-state lighting (SSL) – or lighting applications that rely on LEDs – is a fixture in everyday lighting applications. Now, Prof Hilmi Volkan Demir has created a new generation of LEDs that can improve both your clarity of vision and color discrimination while saving on energy consumed.

These LEDs can achieve high luminous efficacy of optical radiation (LER>350lm/Wopt) and high color rendering indexes (CRI>90) at warm correlated color temperatures (CCT<3500 K), exceeding what is currently possible with commonly used SSL sources that are typically based on phosphor integrated color conversion LEDs.

World-renowned as a pioneer in combining nanocrystals with LED lights to produce light in all colours of the spectrum, Prof Demir has interfaced highly-efficient colloidal Quantum Dots (QDs) nanocrystals with these LEDs. He and his team at NTU’s LUMINOUS! Centre of Excellence for Semiconductor Lighting and Displays use photonic and excitonic color conversion of colloidal QDs, taking two separate approaches in polymer platforms and inorganic platforms, in addition to using plasmon-exciton interactions in energy transfer for both.